DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 38D: Arrows & Skulls

The room beyond was filled with carefully arranged piles of bulky, broken machinery bearing the unmistakable patina of age. Kneeling amidst this equipment – her back to the door – was a single ratling dressed in pale yellow robes.

“Not now! I don’t want to be disturbed!” she hissed.

Tee put an arrow through the back of her skull.

“… was that Silion?” Tee looked back at the others. “I think that was Silion!”

If you’ve been hanging around the Alexandrian for a while, this is a moment you may recognize. I’ve talked about it in articles, videos, and So You Want To Be a Game Master, among other places. When I talk about not fudging your dice rolls, this is a moment I’m thinking about.

Because Silion is a big deal. I believe the PCs first became aware of her in Session 9, which means the players have literally been hunting her for years. And we just introduced a new PC whose backstory and primary campaign hook were linked to her!

So if we were going to prep plots or enforce preconceived outcomes or try to “preserve” the dramatic moment, this would be THE MOMENT to do it, right? Silion can’t die like this! A single critical hit to the back of her head? The PCs never even saw her face! This is a disaster!

… except, of course, it wasn’t.

It’s been just over fifteen years since this moment happened at the game table, and my players still talk about it. They’ll probably be talking about it until the day they die. It’s a cherished memory from the game table.

Okay, but… why?

The Principles of RPG Villainy breaks this down in more detail, but the short version is that, for the players, this was not anticlimactic in any way. It was a huge reward for all their hard work: They had, in fact, worked for years to get here. They’d come up with clever plans to infiltrate the temple (even if not all of them had worked). They’d successfully snuck their way down to this inner sanctum.

They earned this.

And that’s why, a few minutes later, they can gleefully taunt Silion’s mate, Urnest, with what they’ve done. Because they were the ones who did it.

If I had fudged the results — maybe by boosting her hit points or bumping up her AC so that they couldn’t confirm the critical hit — that would have been a huge letdown for the players. Sure, they would have gotten to face off against Silion and maybe she’d summon reinforcements and there’d be an epic battle and the PCs would triumph or whatever… but none of that would have been something they actually did. It would have just been a thing that happened to them.

And the really key insight is that, conversely, if I’d tried to pre-script and force this moment — surprising Silion and shooting her in the back of the head! — it would have also fallen flat. Because it still wouldn’t have been something that the players actually did.

This is why moments like this — moments of great truth at the table — are so important. Because they’ll teach your players that what’s happening in the game is really happening. It’s not a script. It’s not a trick. If they achieve great victories, it’s because they actually earned those victories. And if they suffer horrible defeats, that’s a burden they have to bear… because they know it could have gone a different way if they’d made different choices.

As the players learn that lesson — as the belief of it seeps down into their souls — it will literally breathe life into every other moment of your campaign. It will elevate everything you and your players do to a new level.

When you truly play to find out — when you actively play scenarios instead of prepping plots — you’ll discover that moments like this aren’t unusual. What makes this particular moment notable, perhaps, is that it simply might be the purest example possible:

Boom.

Arrow to the head.

Campaign Journal: Session 39A – Running the Campaign: Using Scenery & Traps
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 38C: Scouting the Temple

Nasira quickly muttered an incantive prayer and projected a sense of clairaudience into the sanctuary hall below. She was in time to hear the ratmen deciding to summon reinforcements. She quickly informed Tee of what was happening, and Tee rushed back to the street in case the ratmen headed that way (in which case she could follow them).

But she saw nothing: The ratmen didn’t leave through the front door. Instead, Nasira heard the sound of scraping stone…

When I ‘m prepping published dungeons, I have a tendency to make them BIGGER.

Sometimes I think this might be a bad habit, but the results in actual play seem to be good.

What’s really going on is a couple of things: First, when I’m planning a campaign, I’m often pulling stuff in from a bunch of different sources. Sometimes that’s two different adventures that get linked to each other using node-based design, but sometimes I have two different “ruins of a dwarven city” adventures… and couldn’t they be the same dwarven city? I can just make one of the adventures Level 1 of the dungeon and the other adventure Level 2, and now, instead of two small dungeon cities, I have one BIG dungeon city that truly lives up to the name. Plus I can mix all the scenario hooks from both adventures and create all sorts of dynamic vectors for the PCs!

(See The Campaign Stitch for a deeper dive into this sort of thing.)

The second thing that happens is that I simply get inspired. As I’m reading through an adventure, all of the adventure’s cool ideas will start sparking off new cool ideas in my own brain: Sometimes those are ideas I can just add to the existing room key, but in other cases it’ll make more sense to pile ‘em all up and fill a new sub-level with them.

The Temple of the Rat God is a good example of what this looks like in actual practice.

This adventure exists because the Nights of Dissolution mini-campaign, which was one of the building blocks for In the Shadow of the Spire, features several of the chaos cults in Ptolus working with each other. And I basically thought, “Why not all of them?” So I went through the Ptolus and Chaositech sourcebooks and started grabbing chaos cults. Then I made a few of my own. Then I started linking them together with clues, creating a node-based campaign structure.

The Temple of the Rat God comes from the Ptolus sourcebook (p. 394), where it looks like this:

As you can see, it’s not fully keyed. So I took the map, made some modifications, and keyed it:

You can see I’ve added additional hallways leading off the edges of this map and connecting to other maps.

Elsewhere in Ptolus there’s a Ratman Nest (p. 442). This is a fully keyed adventure designed for the DM to drop it pretty much anywhere in the city sewers where the PCs might be chasing ratmen:

I decided to put it here, once again with some minor modifications. (You can see the changes on the map above, including the addition of a sinkhole and the connection to the temple.)

During my campaign prep, I’d also thumbed through my monster books for inspiration. Knowing that ratlings and the Temple of the Rat God were on the menu, I scooped up cranium rats from the 3^rd Edition Fiend Folio and the rylkar (dangerous fire rats) from Monster Manual V. (I also linked the latter to ash rats from Monster Manual II.) I rekeyed the Ratman Nest map to include cranium rat nests, and then added a whole new level down the sinkhole — the Rylkar Depths:

The result is a fairly expansive example (showcasing, as it does, a wide gamut of techniques all coming together), but it’s what I enjoy about working with published adventures: When the creativity of the author and the creativity of the game master combine, you end up with richer and more varied material than you could have achieved on your own.

I’m a really big believer in the power of collaborative creation, whatever form it might take.

This is a topic we’ll also likely revisit as the PCs begin delving deeper into the Banewarrens. There, too, I took inspiration from the core concept of the adventure and then drew on a wide variety of sources to create fresh wards: What else could the Banelord have locked away down there?

Campaign Journal: Session 38D – Running the Campaign: The Secret Life of Silion
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 38C: SCOUTING THE TEMPLE

May 9th, 2009
The 21st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

“I’ve been told that you were asking questions about a woman named Silion.”

“That’s true,” Tee replied suspiciously.

Nasira’s eyes narrowed. They had a particular look of worn determination, like one who has gazed into the long, hard face of nature. “I know where she can be found,” she said. “I’ve been looking for her.”

“Why?”

“You may not know this, but she’s a cultist serving chaos—“

“That doesn’t really surprise me,” Tee admitted.

“I see.” Nasira pursed her lips. “I’m not really interested in her. But she works for a man named Wuntad.”

“We should wait,” Tee said. “I have some friends. They should hear this, too.”

It wasn’t long before the others joined them, and when they did, Nasira told her story: Wuntad had killed her father and destroyed her village. She hadn’t been able to follow him, but she knew that he had worked with a woman named Silion – and she had traced Silion here to Ptolus. She hoped that Silion would be able to lead her to Wuntad.

“Wuntad is here in Ptolus, too,” Tor said.

“Really?” Nasira said. “Do you think we should just go to him directly?”

They exchanged nervous glances.

“The truth is,” Tee said. “We don’t know where he is, either. If you think Silion can lead us to him, all the better.”

“Why did Wuntad kill your father?” Ranthir asked.

(“Not that he needs any reason to do it,” Elestra muttered.)

“He was researching the lore of the Atapi,” Nasira said.

“The Atapi?”

“A nomadic desert people,” Nasira explained.

“Atapi?” Tor wondered aloud. “That sounds familiar.”

“It does?” Elestra looked surprised.

Tor nodded. “I saw it on a map in Zavere’s office. At Harvesttime.”

Ranthir put the question on the table: “Why would Zavere be interested in the Atapi?”

They had no idea. But they had been suspicious of Zavere before, and this led them only to greater suspicion. Although, in the end, Elestra summed up their thoughts: “We have to trust somebody at some point.”

“No we don’t,” Tee said.

“Even if we can’t trust him,” Tor said. “It’s not like there’s much we can do about it.”

“Who’s Zavere?” Nasira asked, wide-eyed with confusion.

“We’ll explain later,” Agnarr said.

“How long have you been in Ptolus?” Tee asked.

“Not long,” Nasira said. “A couple of weeks.”

“There’ll be lots of things to explain.”

The decision was made for Nasira to join them as they pursued her lead to Silion.

“Where is she, anyway?”

“At the Temple of the Rat God,” Nasira said. “It’s a front for the Cult of the Blooded Knife. I know that Silion controls the temple, but I’ve never seen her. I have seen Urnest – a hulking ratbrute who serves as her right hand man.”

This prompted another flurry of note-checking and memory-searching as they paired up the references they had discovered to both Silion and the Temple of the Rat God and began to weave a larger understanding of her activities. Nasira was able to confirm that the Blooded Knife was associated with various shivvel dens in the Warrens (although she hadn’t had a chance to investigate them closely), which seemed to tie in with the note they had found at Linech Cran’s.

Nasira had lacked the strength to tackle the temple directly. But with all of them working together, they felt the challenge should be manageable.

Before that could happen, however, Tor and Ranthir needed to keep their appointment with Sir Seppa at the Administration Building.

NEWS & INFORMATION

When Tor and Ranthir arrived at the Administration Building around mid-morning, they found Sir Seppa waiting for them. Tor quickly managed the introductions and then Seppa proved as good as his word: After a couple of hours digging through the appropriate boxes of musty records, they turned up an ancient survey map of the area now occupied by the Necropolis. The map indicated the location of several structures, one of which was marked with Alchestrin’s sigil.

Meanwhile, Elestra was hitting the streets. The events on Tavern Row the previous evening were dominating the headlines of the newssheets, but there were a number of other stories and rumors to be found: It was being reported that a half dozen children had disappeared from Gnarl Street in Midtown over the past three days. And the mutilated body of a woman – her skull ripped open – had been found on Flamemoth Way in Oldtown.

SCOUTING THE TEMPLE

While the others fanned out across the city, Tee and Nasira headed to the Temple District to scout out the area around the Temple of the Rat God.

The temple was located on the Blessed Bridge: This hefty bridge of stone, running between Midtown and the Temple District, was broad enough that a jumble of buildings had been built along both sides of its length. The entrance to the temple of the Rat God was crammed between two other buildings; in fact, it appeared as nothing more than a nondescript door leading to the half-basement level of an adjoining temple built literally over the top of it.

Asking around, Tee discovered that this other door led to the Temple of the Jade Idols, a minor Reformist cult. Since these were not the only small temples jammed together along the Blessed Bridge, there was no reason to suspect that the jade idolaters were associated with the ratmen or chaos cultists.

After mulling the matter over for awhile, Tee’s impatience eventually got the best of her. (Maybe a little Agnarr was starting to rub off on her.) She told Nasira to watch her back and then simply barged through the front door.

Inside she found a dimly lit sanctuary hall. At the far end, at the top of a short flight of stairs, was a large statue depicting an upright rat holding out its front legs like greedy hands and wearing a vicious, bloodthirsty sneer. Scrawled along the walls were several crude, graffiti-like messages (“beauty is plague”, “love is greed”, “the solace of filth”, and the like). Three hooded figures were knelt in prayer before this idol, but they were on their feet almost instantly as the door opened.

“Oh… I’m sorry,” Tee said. “This isn’t the Temple of the Jade Idols.” She backed out and shut the door.

But not before she’d seen a furry hand.

Tee had seen no doors leading out of the sanctuary, but she and Nasira both agreed that there must be some secret egress. And now that Tee had a firm visual reference for the temple, they could continue their investigations magically.

Heading into the Temple of the Jade Idols, they found a curving maze of small, incense-filled rooms. The walls were lined with various niches containing jade idols of the nine gods and forming a variety of small shrine-like areas of worship. Nasira explained that the jade idolaters believed that the idols of the nine gods, carved from nine different types of jade (the “harmonic lifestone”), captured the Song of the World.

They found one of the smaller shrines tucked back near where Tee estimated the worshipping ratmen were kneeling below them. Nasira then reached out into a higher consciousness and felt her thoughts seeking out the minds of those below them. They had hoped that Nasira would be able to detect the thoughts of other ratmen and, from that, ascertain the layout of the rest of the temple. But if there were other ratmen present, they were too far away for her to find them.

So, instead, she latched onto the mind of one of the ratmen in the sanctuary hall and pushed, looking for thoughts that would reveal the secret entrance to the temple recesses. Unfortunately, she read his panic: He had felt the strength of her connection and his suspicion was exploding.

Nasira quickly muttered an incantive prayer and projected a sense of clairaudience into the sanctuary hall below. She was in time to hear the ratmen deciding to summon reinforcements. She quickly informed Tee of what was happening, and Tee rushed back to the street in case the ratmen headed that way (in which case she could follow them).

But she saw nothing: The ratmen didn’t leave through the front door. Instead, Nasira heard the sound of scraping stone. Perhaps more importantly, she heard them decide to not warn Silion (she was quick-tempered apparently) – confirming that she was somewhere within the temple.

When Tee returned, she nodded her head. “It’s interesting that when they go for reinforcements they go farther in, not out into the street.”

They concluded that the sound of scraping stone must be some sort of secret door within the sanctuary. They suspected the temple complex was larger than it appeared, but perhaps not. “There might be a connection to the sewers,” Nasira pointed out. “They might be going through the sewers to get reinforcements.”

A little later, Nasira heard another scraping of stone and the arrival of more ratmen. Shortly thereafter, the strength of her spell gave out.

Running the Campaign: Expanding Dungeons – Campaign Journal: Session 38D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 38B: Nasira’s Story

The next morning, as was her familiar custom, Tee arose a few hours before the others and went down to the common room to break her fast. While she picked at pieces of cold mutton, a young woman approached her table. She was a wiry thing — rather plain, and generally brown: tanned skin, light brown eyes, brown hair, and with a dress of pale brown.

“Is your name Tithenmamiwen?”

Tee nodded.

“My name is Nasira. I’ve been told that you were asking questions about a woman named Silion.”

Tee palmed a dagger.

Back in Session 8, we added a new player to our group.

In Session 37, we sadly lost a player.

Now we’re adding a new player to replace the one we lost. The basic procedure we’re following hasn’t changed much, but there are a few twists that I think are worth mentioning.

First, for the reasons we looked at during the last session, the group wasn’t just looking to add any new character: They were specifically interested in filling the gap left by Dominic’s departure. They wanted a healer.

Generally, I don’t like putting any limits on what characters a new player can play. I also don’t put a lot of stock in the idea that every group needs to conform to some “standard” set of roles. (See our previous discussion about non-standard groups.) But this was a very specific circumstance and, as I’ve noted, it was being driven by the group’s desire to fill a very specific need.

With that being said, I didn’t want this new character to just be a carbon copy of Dominic with the name scratched out and a new one written in: That would be boring. It also wouldn’t be fair to the new player.

To make sure she felt creatively free to make the character she wanted to play, (a) I made sure the remit was as broad as possible and (b) I also tapped my own system expertise to offer her a wide variety of build concepts that could potentially deliver the healing the group was looking for.

If I recall correctly, there was a point where we considered making “let’s find a replacement” diegetic — i.e., the PCs would actually go looking for a new compatriot. As I began exploring Nasira’s background with the new player, however, it was clear that this character wasn’t a “healer for hire” or anyone else who could be logically recruited by an adventuring party.

So how could Nasira be introduced to the campaign?

I used a combination of the collaborative methods for creating campaign characters described here, taking the background Nasira’s player had given me, fleshing it out with additional lore, and tweaking elements to provide hooks (including the big, obvious hook featured in this session) that would not only bring Nasira to the current PCs, but also naturally align her goals with theirs.

As described in GM Don’t List #19: Ignoring PC Backstories, this went both ways: I harvested elements introduced by Nasira’s player in her backstory and seized the opportunity to flesh out my campaign notes.

During this back-and-forth process, I also took the opportunity to seed some stuff into Nasira’s background that wouldn’t turn up in campaign until later. (As it turned out, much later: It wasn’t until around Session 100 that some of this stuff started paying off.)

OPEN TABLE RECRUITMENT

The other big twist was that this was the first time I’d recruited a new player to a long-term campaign since I’d started running my first open table.

Holy shirtforks! It was amazing!

Not only had I been running games for this new player for several months, but the other players in the Ptolus campaign had been playing games with her. So when we asked the question, “Who should be the new player?”, not only did we all know exactly who we wanted, we were also absolutely sure she’d be the perfect fit for the group (and vice versa).

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Running an open table would be worth it even if the only thing you liked about it was recruiting new players to your dedicated campaigns.

Not only have I repeated this process of adding a new player from my open table to an ongoing campaign several times since this inaugural example, it’s also the primary method I use for recruiting players to brand new campaigns too (like Eternal Lies, Dragon Heist, Blades in the Dark, Night’s Black Agents, and so forth).

The results are exemplary every single time.

Campaign Journal: Session 38C – Running the Campaign: Expanding Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index